With or without the dentures, Washington had to endure constant misery. He spent Sunday, January 17, 1790, at home in excruciating tooth pain, writing in his diary the next day, “Still indisposed with an aching tooth and swelled and inflamed gum.”1 Later in the year Tobias Lear bought laudanum for Washington’s household account, which was likely used to relieve the tortured presidential mouth. Washington could also have derived opiates from poppies grown at Mount Vernon.
